Television You May Not Be Watching

I watch a lot of television. It's a legitimate artistic medium! And you can stop lamenting the cancellation of Arrested Development and Firefly, because there's plenty to watch this very autumn!

The four comedies I've listed here are the funniest things on television right now. I fear that the newer shows will get cancelled in their prime, due to low viewership.  The other two shows are on seasons five and six, respectively, and still haven't lost their sparkle.

I've also included Smallville, for some reason.

Fun fact: I don't recall any of the shows listed here ever using painfully prolonged cringe humour.

Disclaimer: These programs are rated 14+, as they may contain violence, profanity, and depictions of sexual activity.

Relative Newcomers

Cougar Town 

Wednesday 8:30 (ABC/CITY) - New episode November 17th
The only cougar remaining on this program is a peripheral character. It's the most improved show of last year.

If you watch Modern Family, I implore you to keep the television on for another half-hour. Because, with a name like "Cougar Town", this show needs all the spill-over it can get. More than any show on television right now, Cougar Town gives me the feeling of hanging out with friends and family. It played out the title's appropriateness in the first six episodes or so, but the real premise is a woman who at 42 was never prepared for single life (or for her son to grow up) learning where she can find meaning in her life. Like the next "relative newcomer" on this list, Cougar Town has managed to live up to the promise of its first season. The other feel-good family comedy to share the 8-9 block, Modern Family, deserved it's Best Comedy Emmy last year, but I can't help but feel that it's losing momentum in comparison.
Fun fact: I never see the title card coming. You think it must have passed already, because it is very brief and it's 8:37... then, BAM!, there it is. This season they've made humourous additions to the title screen including "(Still) Cougar Town", "It's not what the show is... Cougar Town" and "Titles are Hard: Cougar Town"


Community
Thursday 8:00 (NBC/CITY) - New episode November 11th
It shares its time slot with The Big Bang Theory, but this show is doing way more interesting things with it.

I've heard this show compared to the early seasons of The Simpsons (yeah, I played that card). The characters are wacky and the situations are surreal, but I must care about the students at Greendale Community College because this show is so gosh diddly-darn heartwarming at times. Setting a show at a community college is a genius idea, because it puts together characters that are so diverse in terms of age, race, faith, political views, family, and interests. It's great to see how they learn to learn from each other AND how they all get sucked into the same craziness. You may have heard of their big concept episodes like "Modern Warfare" (action movie parody), "Contemporary American Poultry" (mafia parody), and  "Epidemiology" (zombie parody), but lower-key episodes like "Accounting for Lawyers" and "Psychology of Letting Go" have a lot of emotion with a good measure of crazy.
Fun Fact: It has the catchiest title sequence I've seen since 30 Rock first came on the air. Also, in a recent episode a main character had an entire plot play out in the background of other scenes, with no commentary.

Stalwarts

30 Rock
Thursday 8:30 (NBC/CITY) - New episode November 11th
It's still got it, even if it looked like it might lose it.

I'm mostly recommending 30 Rock to those who jumped ship because they felt the quality drop. The latter half of Season 4 had over-arcing plots with great returns, namely Liz's "future husband" plot with guest star Michael Sheen and the purchase of NBC by Kabletown. This season had a great premiere, and last week's "Reaganing" used each character really well (even Jenna and Kenneth). Since the premiere also used Jenna well, I'm wondering if there's a correlation there. If you're watching season four, a low tolerance for Julianne Moore's Bostonian impersonation may discourage you.
Fun Fact: I got nothing. I considered doing some research for a fun fact, but you could do that if you wanted to.

American Dad! - New episode tonight!! (November 7th)
Sunday 9:30 (FOX/Global)
It's simply hilarious. It makes me laugh my weird, loud, suffocating-seal laugh -- and more often than most other shows.
 
It has the wild, manic energy of that other Seth MacFarlane show, except there are no cut-away gags. The humour happens right there, when the characters are interacting with each other. It can be pretty violent, risqué, and off-colour, just like Family Guy, but here the character relationships aren't sacrificed to service the offensiveness. The only real relationship left in Family Guy is between Brian and Stewie, but on American Dad! great episodes have come from the relationships between all five leads. I'd say "passionate" describes each of the Smith family members, but "obsessive" and "delusional" also work.
Fun fact: As of last year, all events depicted in this program may be an elaborate illusion.

Surprising comeback?

Smallville
Friday 8:00, Saturday 5:00 (SPACE)
It's still on the air. I was surprised too. This season, we might actually see some blue tights and the return of Lex.

I have high hopes for Smallville's last season (season ten). The last two seasons had to do without the series' best villains, Lex and Lionel Luthor. It was dark times. They had replacements, but Doomsday was dull and Tess Mercer (female Luthor surrogate) is still all over the place. Even worse, the show devoted way too much time to Green Arrow's melodrama. But the first few episodes of this season teased the viewers with a satisfying conclusion to the series. A disturbed Lex clone is rapidly aging from childhood, Lois and Clark are on the same page, and Clark is getting pressured to be a more public figure. As long as Tess avoids sleeping with every new male character, Green Arrow remains seen and not heard, and Tess avoids being part of every secret organization, this season should turn out great.

Fun fact: Oh god, what am I saying? How about you don't watch Smallville, and I just tell you which episodes are worth it.  Last night's wasn't. If you liked Smallville years ago and forgot about it after the writer's strike, this is a good time to pick it back up.

I Watch, But I Don't Feel Strongly About Recommending

If you didn't like these shows before, you still won't like them.  Some are really good shows, but are so hyped that I don't think they need my endorsement. Some have consistency issues.

The Simpsons, Family Guy, How I Met Your Mother, Glee, Modern Family, The Big Bang Theory, The Office

But seriously. Arrested Development was starting to get weird near the end, and was on long enough to tell some really great stories, but Firefly barely had a chance! There was so much left unexplored!

Communication is a tricky thing

I recently condensed my life's purpose into a sixteen-word sentence (thirteen if you don't count articles and conjunctions - yeah, that's right, separate and not equal).  It took cooperation, focus, deep thought, a sense of language, and several hours of work, all told. I shared the sentence with my father, who said it was "pith", which I took to mean "glib, empty words" by the tone of his voice. After consulting a dictionary, I realized that "pith" and "glib, empty words" have nearly perfectly opposite meanings. He wasn't dismissing my sentence, no matter his tone; he actually expressed appreciation for my accomplishment. But in that moment of misunderstanding, I inferred from his reaction that pithy words may have volumes of meaning for one person, yet would require significant unpacking to be understood by someone else.  When I read my life purpose sentence, its three verbs, two prepositions, four nouns, four adjectives, one article and two conjunctions evoke all my accomplishments, past and future. When someone else reads it, it could just be sixteen words, taken at face value. In most cases, people will attribute some of their own baggage to every statement ("He's lying", "I agree", "I like this", "This reminds me...", "What's his agenda?").  The chances that two people will read the same words the same way are infinitesimal.

So what's my point? That last statement is common enough knowledge, even without having to give it much thought. I believe the thought part is interesting enough on its own merit!  I'm not posting my sixteen-word sentence here because it's so pithy that it would take pages of explanation to do justice to the work I put into it. And it's pretty personal. But I am temporarily fascinated with the concept of communication, which is a topic that everyone can enjoy!

I want to communicate my thought processes more than my opinions, because I believe it's more interesting and more informative. I dare to dream that it will inspire original thought on your end as well.

So, if everyone's baggage adds a little personal flair to whatever they hear, then I can see why political messages often gloss over facts to make the emotional message as striking as possible. If people are going to react emotionally to the facts anyway, it makes sense to make the preferable emotion part of the message too. The alternative method of reigning in emotion is taking the voting public step-by-step through the background of each issue before making a point, which is hard to do in a thirty second television spot.  The public doesn't have time anyway.

But thinking this doesn't make it any more bearable to watch. Blatant emotional ploys (superiority, fear, sympathy) make me feel dirty when I agree with the point being made and offended when I disagree. I like sober reasoning.

Whoa! When did this get all political? Ha ha. No worries, friends. That's as political as I'm going to get in the foreseeable future. I guess opinions are unavoidable.  Communication is a tricky thing.


This is nice. I finally liked a post enough to finish it and display it. More to come...?

I like a lot of things.

I like trashy romance novels, and almond related pastries, and carnivals, and mountains, and really loud concerts, and listening to disco on trains, and the internet, and about a million other things.

But sometimes I think that while I probably like all of these things equally, there are a few things that I enjoy doing/ eating/ watching/ etc. that really make me feel most like myself. For example, when I listen to Celtic music (or anything that incorporates a lot of bagpipes), I feel most like Tara. This isn't to say that I like that music any more than I like listening to show tunes or metal or anything else in my music library, in fact I can go months at a time without feeling the need to pop in a Gaelic Storm CD, but when I do it just seems to get under my skin a little more than any other kind of sound.

Lately a few things in life have conspired to leave me feeling a little off kilter, and last night I quite accidentally had an evening that seemed tailor designed to make me feel more like myself. When Grant and I lived in Kingston our most recent apartment was right over a Vietnamese restaurant, which is basically one of my all time favorite kinds of food. I don't think I've had Vietnamese food since the last time I was hungover in Kingston, so when my parents suggested we try a local place, I was pretty excited to indulge in the Jersey version of the #34 that I always used to order. Afterwards we went home and ended up watching a documentary that I've been wanting to see for some time, 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould, which if you like music or non-linear storytelling, go watch it immediately!

It sounds kind of douche-y and pretentious to say that Vietnamese food and an avant-garde Canadian documentary clicked me into feeling a little more like myself, but who are you to judge? Grant, you've been quiet for a few weeks, I challenge you to a topical blog post: what activities/ sounds/ sights/ tastes make you feel most like yourself?

Words, words, words!

I've been thinking about the intersections between vocabulary and geography lot lately.

An example. The other night at practice I forgot to bring a water bottle. There was an empty one in my car, and so I wanted to determine if there was a water fountain anywhere in our practice space or if I was just going to have to suck it up/ pass out from dehydration.

"Is there a drinking fountain around here?" I managed to ask that night's practice leader between asthmatic pants.

"A what?"

This is where I paused. Either the nice tall man hadn't heard me over the sounds of chatter and velcro, or he was also from Wisconsin. I took a leap of faith.

"A bubbler*?" I ventured.

He shrugged and went into the hallway to look, while the girl sitting next to me took a sudden interest. "You did not just say 'bubbler!?!" She looked amused. I somewhat sheepishly admitted that I had grown up in Wisconsin, and she told me that her husband is from Rhode Island, where the term is apparently also used.

Another girl gave me her extra bottle of water and practice continued on, but my mind lingered on my hopeful attempt at regionalism.

I was born in Massachusetts and until I was about seven I had a fairly awesome little New England accent. Then we moved to Wisconsin, where I was made fun of for saying things like caw instead of car (or key-ar, if you're going to be Midwestern about it) and eventually my accent faded into something that was no longer "posh" New England, but definitely not a character from Fargo either. Despite the fact that my accent seemed fairly impervious to Wisconsin, after just three and a half years of living in Ontario, I've noticed that my lately my vowels are more rounded, and my bosses tease me when I mention "clocking out."

What I'm getting at with all of this rambling, is that I don't really sound like I'm from anywhere particular. I just sound like I'm from North America, generally. So while some people can answer "where are you from?" just by the way they say "ya'll" or "caw" I tend to look toward regional vocabulary if I want to add some flavor to my indistinct intonations. This also means that when I say "bubbler" or unthinkingly slip an "eh" at the end of my sentence I get raised eyebrows or made fun of for trying to be Canadian. But to me these words are like little badges, showing where I've been and which places have left an impact on who I am. If accents are like vocal landmarks, I sometimes feel like I'm left surreptitiously building little trails signs out of my vocabulary. Your ears might just skim right past the "bubbler" in my sentence the same way you might not notice that someone arranged a few sticks just so while walking in the woods. But its there. And, as I fumble to explain that I'm only living in South Jersey, no I'm not really from here, these words are a comfort, inconspicuously pointing towards home.


__________________________________

*A definition according to Wikipedia:

The 'bubbler' was developed in 1888 by the then-small Kohler Water Works (now Kohler Company) in Kohler, Wisconsin, which was already well-known for its faucet production. While Harlan Huckleby is credited with the actual design, it was Kohler who patented it and trademarked the name. The original bubbler shot water one inch straight into the air, creating a bubbling texture, and the excess water ran back down over the sides of the nozzle. It was several years later before the bubbler adapted the arc projection, which allowed the drinker to partake more easily.

And now you know!

In Which I Originally Forgot to Title this Post

Happy belated Labor Day! I kept wanting/ meaning to post over the weekend, but since both my sister and J-beau were visiting, I didn't have a whole lot of time to compose my days into pithy anecdotes.

Truthfully, the weekend wasn't particularly exciting anyway. My family went to the Amish market for fresh pretzels and delicious meats. J-beau and I went wine tasting (please take a moment to laugh at how ridiculous the idea of fine New Jersey wine sounds), and then on the way home stopped by a race track and took in some drag racing. Wine + race cars = classiest, most random date ever.

The fun stuff all happened today, and that was what I was saving up my blogging powers for. Today involved driving way into Pennsylvania to get some footage of an installation for my company, and then driving into another section of Pennsylvania for my first ever roller derby practice!

I haven't been on roller skates since I was 17 and it was a part of high school gym curriculum. Still, I do have vague memories of being the best at roller blading on my block, circa age 6. I also like ice skating. These were pretty much my qualifications going into practice. I was the least expereienced of the rookies, but I had a lot of fun learning to stop and fall and block. I think that the sport will be a good outlet for my aggression, plus I don't think that I've played a legitimate, organized team sport (non gym class related) since... the fifth grade during an ill-fated attempt at the basketball team? Before that it was soccer in grade 2... which is another childhood trauma for another blog post.

Plus, I'm answering Grant's challenge from his last post, however indirectly. I haven't been back to the gaming store yet (too busy to fight the last boss!), but I have joined a team sport, which has to count for something - especially when its as cool as derby.

Grant makes a saving throw to end "drudgery"

I'm still not sure what this wonderblog is about. There's no real theme, except for "items of interest".  I imagined I would play off Tara's entires more, and vice-versa, but so far our entries have not had any relation.  I've decided to just let "it" happen, whatever "it" is.

And as fortune would have it, I have a continuation on the theme of Tara's Why Can' t We Be Friends? post. I went to bed Monday night feeling irritable and bored. I tried eating, music, cartwheels, whooping, walking, singing, conversation and hugs, but nothing made me feel better. I'll skip the internal monologue (which, incidentally has a neat Wikipedia page) which led to my diagnosis: I had nothing to look forward to. Without something enjoyable and reliable to fill my calendar, my foreseeable future was a grey haze of daily drudgery.

So I left the house Tuesday morning intent on finding a RPG group to join, specifically Dungeons & Dragons (What's an RPG you ask? I found a great RPG podcast, Fear The Boot, which dedicated Episode 115 to explaining RPGs for the layman). I've been meaning to start playing for a year now.  It was surprisingly easy. By the time I got home Tuesday evening, I had managed to find not one, but two groups to join (one of them completely by accident). I'm considering joining both groups too. It's more than the game, it's being able to hang out with some like-minded people. It's nice to know that I still have the capacity to make friends. I hung out with the first group as they smote some undead, and within an hour I felt so welcomed and totally at ease. They even took some time out to help me create my very first character.  I bought some new multicoloured dice, and I can't wait to break them out.  I am seriously nerding out you guys.

I challenge you, Tara: have you asked those fine gentlemen to be your friends?

Na na na na Na na na na

DC Comics is releasing a 75th Anniversary Collection of their most prized theme songs, which will have to wait for it's chance at my wallet until after I've bought a couch, a bookshelf, D&D Essentials, and Metroid: Other M (read: after Christmas). The compilation has some glaring omissions - for example, the failure to acknowledge anyone in satin tights, fighting for her rights.  Also missing is the theme song from Batman: The Animated Series, one of my all time favourite cartoons.

For those who haven't seen the show, it was heavily influenced by Tim Burton's Batman films from 1989/92. The portrayals of Bruce Wayne (Kevin Conroy) and The Joker (Mark Hamill) here are still considered the standard by many fans, myself included. Several elements from the show even made their way into the comics, including new characterization for Mr. Freeze and the completely new character, Harley Quinn.

If you're a fan of the show already, I recommend this audio recording of the show's composer, Shirley Walker, as she walks us through the music from the show. It gets the blood pumping. Near the end of the clip, she touches on the similarity between the themes of the cartoon and the films.  I may be the only one that sees the need to have both themes in the Anniversary Collection, since 1) I think the show is gangbusters and 2) Batman Returns is one of my top three favourite movies.

Ah, this show is one of those children's programs that's even better as an adult. I watched it when I was a kid of course. I was mesmerized by the grotesque villains like Baby Doll, The Ventriloquist, and Clayface. And the heroes... Nightwing was one of my first TV crushes, though at the time I didn't know why I got so excited when he showed up. 

Incidentally, I've just recently gotten into comic books, and I'm hoping some readers could suggest a good story arc that showcases Dick Grayson being awesome.

Hel-lo, Mister Mullet.

As I explored the music of Batman: The Animated Series on YouTube, I came across several recommendations for Batman: The Brave and the Bold. It's the current animated Batman series. Whereas the 90's cartoon took the noir approach to Batman, the new show takes the classic camp approach. I've seen a couple episodes, and it seems like a lot of fun. A lot more promising than The Batman from a few years ago.